Hertfordshire LEP & Stevenage BioScience Catalyst

Proud Sponsors of The Innovation Award

Hertfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership

Hertfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership is one of 39 LEPs across England charged with driving growth forward in their respective regions. Our Strategic Economic Plan sets out a long-term blueprint for smart growth in the county. This is not growth at any cost. Instead it is growth based on knowledge and innovation, and which is concerned with promoting a more resource efficient, greener and competitive economy.

Thanks to our targeted and achievable Strategic Economic Plan, Hertfordshire LEP has successfully secured £221.5m from the Government to support key projects in the county. Over the lifetime of our Growth Deal (2015-2021) up to 15,000 new jobs could be created, 20,000 new homes built and it has the potential to unlock £430m public and private investment.

One of our key priorities is to maintain our global excellence in science and technology. Hertfordshire sits at the heart of the UK’s Golden Research Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London, making it perfectly placed for knowledge-based growth. The county is home to world class science and has a unique concentration of expertise in pharmaceuticals, life science and bioscience.

It our vision that by 2030 Hertfordshire will be the leading economy at the heart of the Golden Triangle, helping to realise its full economic potential and ensuring that the county’s world-beating innovations continue to grow and evolve for decades to come.

Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC) campus is a unique bioscience community created to provide small biotech and life sciences companies and start-ups with access to the expertise, networks and scientific facilities traditionally associated with multinational pharmaceutical companies.

A key aim of SBC is to pioneer a culture of open-innovation that will place the UK bioscience sector at the forefront of worldwide biomedical discovery and deliver cutting edge healthcare solutions. Supported by Government, business, and the charitable sector, the SBC campus offers a fertile environment for scientific innovation and commercial success.

The site has been designed to foster collaboration and interaction between tenant companies with the hope that the combination of opportunity and cooperation will breed innovation and commercial success. This will provide small biotech companies with new insights into their research and development activities and should accelerate the progress from discovery to product development.

With long-term plans to expand the campus by five-fold from the first phase to the third phase, the SBC campus offers a range of equipment and commercial opportunities that would be impossible for a small or medium sized enterprise (SME) to develop alone.

In this vein, one of the latest pharmas to establish a presence at SBC includes the London-based J&J Innovation Centre, who aim to identify exciting new companies for partnership through regular interaction with the start up community.

Another welcome addition is GE Healthcare’s Cell Technology Showsite, where SBC tenants/collaborators have access to various pieces of cutting-edge equipment.

Universities are also part of the mix- Cambridge continues collaboration with GSK to progress their drug candidates, and UCL has moved 3 research projects into laboratory space here.